Posted
by
samzenpus
on Tuesday January 10, 2012 @01:55PM
from the with-a-little-help-from-my-little-friends dept.

Shipud writes "Insulin resistance is the harbinger of metabolic syndrome. Insulin resistance is when the body cannot use insulin effectively. As a result, blood sugar and fat levels rise. Therein lies the path to morbid obesity, diabetes, stroke, and heart problems. A group of Brazilian researchers have taken a strain of mice normally known to be immune to insulin resistance, and made them insulin resistant (pre-diabetic) by changing their gut bacteria. They then gave the mice antibiotics, and by changing their gut bacteria again, reversed the process, curing them of the disease. Their research shows just how influential the bacteria living in our gut can be on our health."

I think i'm missing something here. Obviously the cure for diabetes is giving people antibiotics so they reset their gut bacteria? I mean, i know i'm going out on a limb here trusting a slashdot editor approved summary submission but...

Two problems. First, I imagine there are a variety of causes of diabetes. Changing gut bacteria need not help. Second, you need also to replace the gut bacteria with something better or the reset will just result in the old bacteria coming back.

There is, genetic being one of the big ones. Along with diet, age, obesity, thyroid, medication related, pregnancy, etc. And where it's genetic and it's childhood inflicted, a lot of diabetics still hold out for partial pancreas transplants or something else, otherwise it's live with it. It does work, but compatibility is the real pain. A lot of people though these days it's simply age + lifestyle. Then again, they've changed the definition of what diabetic is too. What was diabetic 10 or even 20 years ago, isn't what it is today. So a whole new broad range of people fall into it.

Actually, you can transplant human gut bacteria to treat disease. It's called Fecal Bacteriotherapy [wikipedia.org]. It's a procedure carried out under the supervision of a doctor where you put a donor's shit up your ass. Unappealing certainly, but at least it's not 2girls1cup style.

There are over-the-counter Lactobacillus acidophilus tablets that contain cultured bacteria already. Why in the world would anyone do it the way you describe? I suppose there are other helpful bacteria in your gut, but that seems to be the most significant variety in terms of its effect on everything from serum cholesterol levels to lactose intolerance....

There are over-the-counter Lactobacillus acidophilus tablets that contain cultured bacteria already. Why in the world would anyone do it the way you describe? I suppose there are other helpful bacteria in your gut, but that seems to be the most significant variety in terms of its effect on everything from serum cholesterol levels to lactose intolerance....

They're also useful if you want to make plastic out of potatoes.

Interesting factoid: Humans are born with a "gut bacteria" backup solution. It's called your appendix. Very useful if you eat something harsh enough to kill your gut bacteria during a 12 week overland march when you're too far to replenish them in the traditional way by shaking hands with strangers and touching your lip.

Or a fecalith, or mechanical kink. Lymphoid hyperplasia is a frequent culprit, but the treatment for appendicitis is surgical excision. The antibiotics are too late once you have symptomatic appendicitis, because the blockage is due not to bacteria in the appendix but to cell proliferation (in response to bacteria that may be in either the colon or the appendix) that will not resolve with mere killing of the bacteria that caused it. Meanwhile, the bacteria in the appendiceal lumen are multiplying rapidly, and will eventually produce pressure necrosis of a portion of the appendiceal wall and rupture.

I'd love a source for that claim. I've never before heard of the appendix described as a gut microbiota reservoir. I've also never heard of someones gut going completely sterile because of a long march.

As long as their is something to digest in your gut, their will be gut microbes. And considering that many of the gut microbes survive primarily on Host synthesized mucus carbohydrate or sloughed Host enterocytes, I'm tempted to call "Bull Shit!" on the entire premise you are suggesting.

The healthiest people have the widest range of bacterial flora, usually established as a child and turn into a life long symbiotic relationship. A tablet could never cover the full range of bacteria for an optimal flora.

Fun fact - Koalas eat eucalyptus (gum tree) leaves, which are pretty toxic to all other animals. They have a special bacteria in their gut which helps break the toxin down. Guess how the bacteria is passed on to the next generation?

Not quite. The appendix is believed to harbor useful bacteria, but how do they get there in the first place? The placenta shields a fetus from most bacteria while it's in the womb, and keeps its blood supply separate from the mother's.

I think i'm missing something here. Obviously the cure for diabetes is giving people antibiotics so they reset their gut bacteria?

gut bacteria depend, in part, on what you eat. The easy way to change them is to flamethrower out your intestines with antibiotics and transplant a new selection, but the ratios can be influenced by food, which is no great surprise I guess. That would be a very interesting follow up paper.

Probably a bit more complicated than that. Bacteria tend to be quite specialized as far as their environment goes, to the point where you have different species of bacteria living in your armpit, the side of your arm, the outside of your elbow, and all of those are quite a bit different than the ones that live on your face. I'll go out on a limb and suppose that maybe different diets have an influence on the bacterial populations in your stomach and intestines (I've heard it suggested that the appendix migh

Perhaps in the future, you might be able to get treatments of beneficial stomach bacteria, maybe even in pill form, to help treat diabetes. I doubt this particular strain found in mice will work though, you would probably have to find a human analog or genetically engineer a bacterium more at home in the human digestive tract.

The natural medicine practitioners that so many folks on Slashdot seem to bash and ignore have been aware of the connection between L. acidophilus and a number of medical conditions for several years. It has just taken this long for the medical community to be sufficiently convinced that they were right through the use of double-blind studies.

Acidophilus pills are available at pretty much every pharmacy and health food store (at least in the U.S.), from CVS and Walgreens to that weird place on the corner that smells kind of like incense, but not quite. I think if I had diabetes, I'd certainly be tempted to give it a shot. In the worst case, it doesn't help your particular form of diabetes, and you wasted a few dollars for a bottle.

Consuming L. acidophilus is also known to reduce serum cholesterol, reduce lactose intolerance in many people (because it produces some of the enzymes that break down lactose), and reduce the incidence of diarrhea in many situations by crowding out the bad bacteria that cause it. Frankly, it's about as close as you can get to a miracle drug, at least when it comes to digestive health, and it's available over the counter for just a few bucks per bottle. And because each pill contains living bacteria that multiply on their own, you don't necessarily need to keep taking it, unlike drugs.

Several years back I picked up an infection which ended up being penicillin resistant. So they put me on a second non-penicillin based antibiotic. This back to back dose of antibiotics wiped out my gut bacteria and caused severe diarrhea. I had enough complications they even had to remove my appendix.

Like almost all of the "natural" remedies, it didn't work at all. I've heard the same story from 3 other people. I wouldn't be surprised if the only people that reported it to work weren't just experiencing the placebo effect. Double blind studies seem to confirm that it doesn't help at all for cholesterol: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15841092 [nih.gov]

My prescription medicine for IBS started out as a "natural" medicine made from a plant, except that it works and is now western medicine instead of alternative medicine.

If you have diabetes, you should consult your doctor before you go experimenting with natural remedies. Some of them, like St. John's Wort, can interfere with the action of the medication that's actually doing something. "Natural" substances aren't inherently safe.

The medical community has known about prebiotics and probiotics as a means of changing micrbiota populations for exactly as long as the natural medicine practitioners. The difference is that medical community does not over sell the value as a means of treating disease.

And you are only partially right about not needing to continue taking it. The point of a prebiotic like an acidophilus pill, is that it increases the population above what was present. The initially low population could be an aberration,

The natural medicine practitioners that so many folks on Slashdot seem to bash and ignore...

It's not just here, Scientific American is another great place to find religious fanatics who worship at the altar of the double-blind placebo controlled study.

It's a tool - it can be used and misused like anything else. It's often so damned expensive to do a proper scientific study that the community simply freezes out ideas they find unappealing by not funding "proper" study of them.

No, what they discovered is actually a flaw in existing research into insulin resistance. To summarize the linked article: There is a strain of mice that did not develop insulin resistance from any of the usual procedures used to induce insulin resistance in mice. This particular group of researchers noticed that these diabetes resistant mice were typically housed in isolation from normal mouse micro-organisms. These researchers housed a group of these mice in "conventional facilities" (as opposed to "germ-free" facilities, which was normal) where they were exposed to various bacteria. These mice then developed insulin resistance. When the gut bacteria from these mice were transplanted into other mice, those mice, also, developed the symptoms of insulin resistance. Finally, if these mice were given broad spectrum antibiotics (presumably killing off the microbiota that had developed in their guts) they lost their insulin resistance.
In summation, what they discovered is that the micro-organisms that live in your intestines play a role in whether or not you develop Type 2 diabetes.

Since killing them again reversed the condition, they could be said to be the cause of some cases rather than just a trigger for developing the condition.

I wonder if this will end up as another case like H. Pylori where we find that a a bunch of people have been long subjected to only moderately helpful treatments, needless special diets, a lot of suffering, and a considerable amount of victim blaming over what was actually just a chronic infection.

Got it backwards. Getting the right bacteria can apparently cure diabetes, or at least remove the symptoms. Killing all the bacteria with an antibiotic won't magically introduce the correct bacteria. (I retained the plural because it's not clear if there is just one strain, or if they have to work together with others)

There is no 'reset' with bacteria, only killing some or nearly all and hoping you get the right replacements. You have to put the right ones in there.

A far better method would be to ensure that they ingest a number of foods which contain live probiotics. And get people to stop talking about goddamned cleanses which throw off the balance of intestinal flora.

No joke. There are existing therapies where individuals who have seriously disrupted gut bacteria colonies basically take a poop pill. The idea is that you re-seed the GI track with the desirable flora in order to establish a healthy and balanced community. Of course the source of the donated flora is something that you might not want to dwell on too long.

As a pre-diabetic myself I'm wondering if this will need to be FDA approved?

I mean aren't active yeast cultures okay in non-FDA approved yogurt? Since these are (I presume) non-pathogenic bacteria, couldn't they also be made available over the counter in pill form (packaged as dried spores?).

I guess you'd still need a prescription for the anti-biotics to clear out the existing flora in your gut though.

As a pre-diabetic myself I'm wondering if this will need to be FDA approved?

I mean aren't active yeast cultures okay in non-FDA approved yogurt?

You're witnessing the beginning of the end. Ordinary foods are starting to be required not to make health claims even when supported by science. Meanwhile if you say your milk doesn't contain rBGH they want you to print lies about how the government can't tell the difference between BGH and non-BGH milk, which has been conclusively proven false in a federal court.

What came first? The chicken or the egg? You see it as lifestyle choices but may not realize that the life style is being impacted metabolically behind the scenes. A person may act like a slug because they don't have energy. Its a cycle and it's hard to change. I'm a diabetic. But I exercise and eat fairly well. But when I was younger all I did was crave sugar constantly. 2/3's of my family tree going back 3 generations is diabetic. I don't think it's quite so cut and dry. To play devil's advocate, yes eating good and exercising will help tons! But it just doesn't always change the WHY of it happening.

Part of the problem is that so many people have been taught that "eating well" means avoiding saturated fat and eating lots of grains and vegetable oil, despite the evidence that such a diet has the exact opposite effect of what is claimed.
Once you figure out that eating well means almost the complete opposite of what the government-sponsored experts have been telling us for the last 30 years it becomes very easy to reverse the process.

While eating less saturated fat is a good step it is not a solution and eating lots of any oil is bad, and not a serious issue unless you have high cholesterol(which can also be controlled with exercise). Eating whole grain bread and other goods as a substitute for white-bread and processed carbohydrates does spread out the sugar release and help to control hunger pangs and chocolate cravings, but you are supposed to swap them in as a substitute not eat "lots" because they are healthy which is counter-prod

I lost 50 lbs by eliminating sugar, starches and grains (and byproducts) and replacing those with saturated fats, green vegetables and meat without even bothering to think about calories and without spending nearly every waking moment exercising. The primal/paleo diets work for a lot of people, far more than are able to make a low-calorie, low-fat diet work for any substantial period of time.

whole grain bread generally has about the same glycemic index as white bread. (It depends on how the bread is prepared, but the standard whole grain bread you see on the shelf is within 5 points of white bread.) Generally this is ~70 for whole grain and ~73 for white bread (Compared to table sugar, which is ~65). Overall your blood sugar doesn't act any different if you eat white bread vs if you eat whole grain bread. Either way it still spikes about the same (certain factors affect how high) then dives.

whole grain bread generally has about the same glycemic index as white bread. (It depends on how the bread is prepared, but the standard whole grain bread you see on the shelf is within 5 points of white bread.) Generally this is ~70 for whole grain and ~73 for white bread (Compared to table sugar, which is ~65).

One of the more interesting things I see regarding regular diet books vs paleo/primal diet books is the use of scientific studies to back up their adv

Unfortunately, the foods that are standard recommendation for 'healthy' eating are exactly the foods that many people should not be eating, and many of the foods that they are told to avoid are the ones they should be eating.

Of course the myth that weight gain is all about eating and exercise is both ridiculous and obvious in being ridiculous. Look at these people that are 350-400 pounds. Could you get to that weight if you tried? I doubt it. I know that if I put an effort into it, I MIGHT be able t

Conversely, I could also never reach 150 lbs without resorting to amputation. There is simply a range that my body is genetically capable of achieving. The same applies to everyone else.

I've seen and experienced for myself far too many success stories with low carb/primal eating to take claims like that at face value. My personal experience corresponds to Mark Sisson's claim that diet is 80% of what determines your body composition.

I eat a low carb diet. Lower than most. My body reacts immediately to any sugar that I eat. If I eat pizza, I will literally put on 2 pounds by the next day. I fully acknowledge that diet plays a part in your weight. That doesn't change the fact that your genetics will determine uppper/lower weight boundaries, what kinds of food will give you the best results, as well as how much food your body needs on a daily basis.

Of course, the part that is determined by environment gets screwed up because peopl

That doesn't change the fact that your genetics will determine uppper/lower weight boundaries, what kinds of food will give you the best results, as well as how much food your body needs on a daily basis.

Sure there's variations but the basic role of insulin in signaling fat cells to start storing sugars in and leptin in appetite regulation don't vary a whole lot for most of the population.

My experience with genetics is that I have a family history of obesity, diabetes and thyroid problems from both parents

Look at these people that are 350-400 pounds. Could you get to that weight if you tried? I doubt it. I know that if I put an effort into it, I MIGHT be able to reach 300 pounds. There is no way that I could reach 400, even with effort. Conversely, I could also never reach 150 lbs without resorting to amputation. There is simply a range that my body is genetically capable of achieving. The same applies to everyone else.

But, hey, since it's so easy you should get a grant for your ideas and make billions (yes with a B).
You could show all these dummies in the several buildings around where I'm sitting (major university biomedical research departments) how easy it all is.
And to think, they had to get PhDs and work for decades in biochemical and medical research. The fools.

Those grants are the reason for the bad advice in the first place. Government (and government-funded) nutritional advice is slanted to favor the special

If you were interesting in the truth you'd actually examine the site and discover that he does in fact cite actual controlled trials and references known facts about endocrinology to arrive at his conclusions. Then if you actually had any facts to refute him with you'd present those instead of ad-hominem attacks.

Type II diabetes and metabolic syndrome are so easy to prevent by not eating the wrong kinds of foods that it's more accurate to refer to those conditions as lifestyle choices rather than diseases.

Now if you told us what in your opinion the "wrong" kinds of food are. As an example, take this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonder_Bread [wikipedia.org] which sounds very healthy, but is just about the worst stuff you can put into your body.

Here is a story of a woman who lost all her gut bacteria and almost died because she couldn't digest her food. They injected some of her husbands and cured her almost instantly.
http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/26178/ [technologyreview.com]

While mammals have many things in common the gut fauna of humans is different of mice's. They were immune to diabetes to begin with, so I think they are not a good model at all for these studies. Sure, the researchers found a way to give them diabetes, but that doesn't mean that human diabetes has the same cause.

Please stop. Contrary to what stupid people say, there is nutrition in Mcdonalds burger. Plenty, in fact. there is also a load ton of fat and salt.
And HFCS is no different then Cane Sugar or beat sugar.

It's a common oversight in reporting about Diabetes not to recognize that there are two separate diseases with the same name. Type I ("One") Diabetes, also called Juvenile Diabetes, is caused largely by genetics and some unknown environmental factors. It is an auto-immune disease in which the immune system attacks the pancreas, causing the body to produce no more insulin. It's the type that requires insulin injections multiple times per day as well as constant monitoring.

Type II ("Two", Adult) Diabetes is caused by genetics in combination with unhealthy lifestyle habits such as unhealthy diets. It's triggered when the body forms a resistance to insulin, normally due to its high concentration in the body resulting from unhealthy eating. It can often be managed by improving diet and/or oral medication, though in some cases it requires insulin injections.

Both diseases result in high blood sugars, and thus the same symptoms, which is why they share a name.

As a Type I Diabetic, it's frustrating when people assume I had an unhealthy childhood or poor eating habits as a young adult due to shoddy reporting that conflates the two diseases due to their horrible naming. I remember there being some call to rename one of the diseases to help avoid this confusion. But I can't seem to find a reference on the Wikipedia articles.

When discussing Diabetes in the future, please be careful to specify which type you are referring to as they are really separate diseases.

You are correct that there are two different types of diabetes but they may not be as different as you think. I've read that there is now some suspicion that type II is also caused by an immune system reaction and Type II patients can also require insulin injections.

The urge to make type II all about "unhealthy lifestyle habits" should be resisted. Type II can occur without an unhealthy diet and without a large amount of visible fat. My father developed Type II in his late 50's and was less than 20lbs over

My wife is a Type I and constantly gets annoyed when the two are used interchangeably. When some stupid TV personality talks about how you can control 'diabeetus' with diet and exercise it takes away from the other spectrum of individuals who can't control it that way. It reduces the visibility of the disease of Type I, making it look like a lifestyle disease, like alcoholism or an STD, instead of a chronic but manageable illness, like arthritis, Lyme disease, or MS.

I've never once taken offense or gotten frustrated when people unknowingly refer to Type 2 diabetes as "Diabetes".

You should - even doctors have gone back to using the old terms "Juvenile-Onset Diabetes" and "Adult-Onset Diabetes" specifically because there are too many retards out there who use the fact that JD (Juvenile Diabetes) cannot be "cured" by dietary changes to avoid dealing with changing their own diet.

I know I've had my fill of people who try to lecture me about how because I have JD that I s

I've read about similar results from fecal transplants to replace colon flora. If I understand it correctly, there are actually doctors that will "reset" your colon flora by giving you a high dose of antibiotics and then basically stick someone else's poop up your butt. I'm sure it's more scientific than that, but it supposedly repopulates your colon with different flora and the people that have undergone the procedure swear it made them lose weight or recover from other problems, etc.

Eventually, pharmacology will focus on the use of indigenous microorganisms for treatment of most human ailments. It may not seem obvious now, but once the patents start churning out, it will become as plain as the snot-filled, puss-covered nose on your face.

conditions like ulcerative colitis, I don't think this is due to the accidental depletion of normal GI flora, such that it could be remedied by re-application. It is due to life-style issues which are non-conducive to those organisms. Just because we are willing to submit ourselves to some of the things we do, doesn't mean that certain critical passengers will be willing to. We need to pursue critical life-sustaining activities and quality rather than so-often depending in medical miracles, which are oft

That's not pedantic - it's a simple fact that seems to be lost on people. Sure, there are factors like diabetes and glandular issues that can make it easier to put weight on... but you still have to eat more than you use!

That's not pedantic - it's a simple fact that seems to be lost on people. Sure, there are factors like diabetes and glandular issues that can make it easier to put weight on... but you still have to eat more than you use!

I disagree. It may be more correct to say "you still have to eat more than your body uses", but its misleading to think you can eat whatever and just work off the extra calories. It doesn't work that way, despite science ignoring the rapid increase in the number of overweight people since the 1980's when they changed their advice from "fats are good" to "fats are bad, eat carbs". Humans have been eating meat and fatty foods since the dawn of time, yet in the 21st century we declare fat as the enemy and then wonder why so many people are putting on weight...??

the eat less/do more thing doesn't seem to be working very well does it? With so many people on diets, how come none of them have any willpower?

I'll give you a clue, people get food cravings because their bodies tell them they are hungry. Is there body trying to hurt them? no, its trying to stay alive.Why would people feel hungry when they are actually not starving? from eating carbs. our bodies are not designed to eat the amount of carbs we do - it just cannot cope, so the mechanisms that tell us when we are full/hungry are not working properly. Start eating real food, not processed stuff, and you can bring your body back to life - and find out what it is really capable of. It can burn its own fat, it doesn't need your help. You just need to give it a chance, by stopping the carb intake which is what's making you fat in the first place...

There are much better articles on that website too, spend some time reading that and you'll know more than most dietitians/nutritionists in the world.

If it really was just about how much you eat vs how much you do, then how do we have people who are thin who can eat loads of food without weight gain, and others who are fat who will put on weight eating half that amount?

Starvation diets will plateau, as your body always adjusts its energy needs to match energy available. If you eat less, your metabolism slows down so you use less. There is nothing you can do about this - your body will keep itself alive at any cost. If you continue to eat less, your body thinks you're on a desert island, and attacks your muscles since these are more "expensive" than fat, and this can reduce your energy needs further, thus keeping you alive longer.

Do the opposite - eat the right amount, but eat well. Eating well means limit carbohydrates to only the amount your body will actually use, which unless you're an athlete, will be under 100g per day, probably under 50g per day.

No carbs, no blood sugar increase, no insulin, no stored fat. Actually there may still be some blood sugar increase from proteins but not enough to be worried about.

Your body can live without carbs. It cannot live without fats, and it cannot live without protein. it can turn protein into glucose when needed (so you get exactly the right amount, not a flood of it), and it can get energy from fat. in fact fat is more energy-dense than carbs, so this is why your body stores its own excess energy as fat - hint: its not trying to kill you. it just stores energy in case you might need it later.

also, no carbs = no bloating. fat/protein helps you feel fuller for longer, so you wont crave sweets (after a week or two). keep off the sugar, it is killing you.

Of many animals both available in abundance and ones that people don't feel too bad about possibly killing, mice and pigs share enough DNA and inner workings to make them both adequate test subjects. Animal testing works very well for many drugs, though of course we won't know how it will exactly react with people just as reactions will differ from person to person. Unlike animals, we interact with other drugs, activities, eating habits, and existing conditions.

But I'm sure people with Diabetes are happier with your "[make] sure you are hungry" remedy./sarcasm

Just out of curiosity, are you also an antivaxxer? Psuedo-science is not "like" science. It is the opposite of real science.

I'm sure that over eating is the only possible cause of type 2 diabetes just like it's the only cause of heart failure and smoking is the only cause of lung cancer and drinking is the only cause of liver failure. Do you also believe that AIDs is the wrath of God? Correlation != causation. While some people are able to control their diabetes through diet and exercise, there are plenty of fit, active people that cannot.

You need to quit giving medical advice. Type 2 diabetes has several causes, and those that you mention are simply not sufficient to identify the disease.

Many people will eat too many Calories, eat too many simple carbs, fail to exercise, and do so for 50 years and *still* not contract T2. In addition to diet, genetics and physical activity play very large roles in developing Syndrome X and T2.

There have been a number of studies since your link was posted (over 3 years ago) that are showing beneficial results, other people have linked to them in other comments on this story. We're still very early into the research on this, but it does appear to have some promise.